MacBU: The Movie Trailer

Well, kind of... Last MacWorld I got to help with building what the Marketing team calls a "sizzle reel." If you've ever been to MacWorld and seen the Microsoft booth there, you know that there's a projection screen in the "theater" area where we demo Office. Well when we break between demos we show stuff on the huge screen for folks just walking by. So that's what you have here. I asked for a copy after we finished back in January, but just re-discovered it on my hard drive and thought I'd share it. Why it's cool:

It shows how long the Mac products have been around and how important they were to young Microsoft.

It shows that we are still very much committed to the Mac. It seems like that comes up every 6 months in the news media.

It shows super old 1.0 versions of Word and Excel that only ran on the Mac.

You get to see the Mac Lab where we run all our automated testing. You see me pretending to check out the lab machines. (If I really had to walk around the Mac Lab every day and "monitor" our millions of automated tests, I'd go insane, but they thought it looked good, like I was working or something...)

You get to see prototype boxes for Office 2004 and VPC that we ended up not using for the final products.

People in the video are NOT models, they actual members of the MacBU, so that's kind of cool too.

Shows the "real" reason people buy VPC: Solitaire. ;-) One thing I learned through all this is the amazing quantity of footage that goes into just a short clip like this. We have a big Mac Lab. I think outside of Apple, it's the biggest Mac test lab the world. The only company that may come close, is Adobe, but we think we've got them beat too. Hundreds and hundreds of Macs. Even so, I wasn't expecting to spend 1 full hour taking shots at different angles and speeds. I think it turned out okay in the end. I hope you enjoy it.